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Nowadays, vehicle lightweight design is a main topic in automotive industry. Crashworthiness, which is the most important performance of a full vehicle, must be always satisfied in the study on body lightweight design. This paper presents research, from the point of view of safety, of structural lightweight design of the front side rail of a passenger car. The response surface method is used to create mathematical models that represent the relationship between structural sheet thicknesses and absorbed energy of the entire structure in the frontal crash simulation, and the relationship between structural sheet thicknesses and the mass of the entire structure. Then an optimization process is performed, and the structural mass and original absorbed energy are defined as objective and constraint functions, respectively. Minimum mass and structural sheet thicknesses are obtained with the satisfaction of original absorbed energy of the front side rail structure. The weight reduction of the front side rail is 26.95%.

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